Sometimes the taste of one of these beans brings on a sweet Proustian memory related to an almost forgotten flavor from the past. Other times the memory is not so sweet. The smell of the four cheese pizza jelly bean was so foul that it had people fleeing from the mixing room. With a bit of tweaking it was reincarnated as barf, a disturbingly popular flavor.

In an echoing, high-ceilinged chamber in Northern California, there spin row upon row of what look like small cement mixers. The gleaming metal drums churn for hours on end while white-uniformed technicians pour in sugar, corn starch, color, and certain other, more miraculous concoctions. Out of one drum comes a whiff of red apple, conjuring a fall afternoon spent picking fruit; from another comes the buttered-popcorn scent of an evening at the movies. Out of drum after drum, all down the room, come smells evoking everything from apple pie to piña coladas to freshly mown grass.Here, at the Jelly Belly candy factory, memories are reincarnated as jelly beans.

I've read before that if you mix chemicals and come up with the chemical compound that tastes like grape, you must call it an artifical flavor. However, if you take actual grapes and isolate the same chemical compound, you can call it natural flavoring, even if ultimately the mass production methods of each is the same. It all matters in how you first derive the flavor. Weird, huh?